bacn – how it all got started
August 20th, 2007
It started at the registration desk at Podcamp Pittsburgh 2 on Saturday afternoon. We (Andy Quale, Jesse Hambley, Tommy Vallier, Jason Head, Val Head and Ann Turiano) were having an amusing discussion about back bacon (aka canadian bacon) and how some people we know twitter so much we have to turn off notifications for them.
Tommy Vallier mentioned that back bacon is also called peameal bacon. You’ll notice that sounds like”email bacon”. Suddenly, we had both a concept and a name for it. Email bacn – notifications you want, just not right now. It’s not spam – you signed up for it and you actually DO want that information – but yet it still feels like it’s wasting your time.
There you have it. The domain was purchased before the conversation ended. A session discussing bacn at Podcamp Pittsburgh 2 was held the next day. Then, a public service announcement was recorded.
Blog posts defining the concept have popped up everywhere. Less than 48 hours later google blog search results for “bacn” look like this. There are even posts about it in russian. The internet is truly amazing!
entries (RSS)
12 Comments
Bill Alexander Says:
And just to think I was sitting on the floor watching Bacn history in the making.
August 20th, 2007 at 11:43 am
val Says:
that’s the beauty of podcamp, isn’t it?
August 20th, 2007 at 11:55 am
Andrew Badera Says:
Lame. You’re doing nothing more than spamming the English language with this “bacn” term. This is pointless — not to mention artificial. Get over yourselves, guys.
PS When I Google “bacn” I don’t get your results — the top 2/3 of my page shows completely unrelated results. Ego check, aisle one.
August 20th, 2007 at 5:58 pm
nimble2 Says:
Mmmmm bacn
August 20th, 2007 at 6:15 pm
Susan Reynolds Says:
Great story and thanks to Chris Brogan for passing it on to the part of the twitterspere I’m tuned into. From a clever conversation it’s gone around the world and turned into all day chatter about non personal email from Geologists= Quakn, Gardener = Rakn etc.
Fabulous material for all of us to work with. Thanks!
August 20th, 2007 at 6:22 pm
val Says:
Sorry this has you so upset, Andrew. It’s really something that needs to be taken a little more lightly.
It was a google blog search I was talking about, btw.(It’s linked above) A straight up google search won’t give the same results.
August 20th, 2007 at 6:24 pm
Justin Kownacki Says:
Funny how serious some people are about their web terminology — or how they think they can stamp a word out just because they believe it’s “lame.”
That’s the beauty of the web: in the end, your opinion may (or may not) matter, but you’re still free to express it. Cheers for conversations, and for the ability to coin a term and watch the armchair linguists of the world rally to debate.
August 20th, 2007 at 9:55 pm
Rebecca Says:
I find it amusing at least, and have blogged about it here in Vancouver
August 20th, 2007 at 10:03 pm
Mosley Says:
I will have to agree… the term Bacn is something we can live without. I wrote a post telling the world that mrbaconpants want to make a stand against bacn.
http://www.mrbaconpants.com/bacn-needs-to-be-stopped/
August 21st, 2007 at 9:59 am
spoon Says:
I think that Mr. Badera just needs a free Brogan hug!
I was in the bacn session and I have to say that what happened in that room was pretty amazing. You figure that a hallway conversation hours earlier would not only spawn a session but without a new buzz word within a day. This is one reason why I love PodCamp… anything can happen in an instant.
cheers!
August 21st, 2007 at 11:03 am
Norm H Says:
Can I just interject that The Art Institute of Pittsburgh taunts itself as the College for Creative minds. Even people who aren’t students seem to keep it real.
August 21st, 2007 at 4:47 pm
Andrew Badera Says:
Andrew is not upset, I just think it’s hard to take new media, and its citizen participants, seriously when we hump this sort of thing out of darkness into an artificial web 2.0 spotlight. If you were looking to prove the power of web 2.0 to generate and propagate a meme, congrats, you did it. Value to society: zero, or negative, just like spam itself.
August 22nd, 2007 at 12:57 pm